Episode 145: Essential Oils and Nervous System Regulation: Using Smell to Heal Grief and Trauma with Jodi Cohen
- THA Operations
- Nov 28
- 14 min read
Updated: Dec 2
Why does the simple act of smelling essential oils directly regulate the nervous system during trauma and grief? How can practitioners support clients who struggle with feeling their bodies? What if smell is the most underutilized tool for creating safety and embodiment?
Seven years ago, Jodi Cohen's 12-year-old son died suddenly in a car accident. Her 14-year-old daughter, about to start high school, needed her mother to stay present through the unimaginable. This episode shares Jodi's journey of daily choosing what helps and what hurts, discovering that smell became her most accessible pathway to nervous system regulation when everything else felt too overwhelming.
You'll learn the science of why our sense of smell is our most direct connection to the limbic system, how rose essential oil counteracts the fear response in the brain, and why smell allows us to titrate our emotional experience in micro-moments rather than getting flooded.
This episode bridges functional medicine and somatic trauma healing for both practitioners and individuals navigating grief, chronic pain, or trauma recovery. Whether you're supporting clients through loss or learning to regulate your own nervous system, you'll discover how to use essential oils as deliberate cues of safety that shift your state without anyone noticing.
In this episode you'll learn:
[00:01:28] Jodi's Story of Loss: How her son's death became a daily practice of choosing what helps and what hurts while parenting through grief
[00:03:08] Why Smell is Critical to Survival: The science of olfactory receptors and how rose essential oil counteracts the brain's fear response
[00:05:27] Stories Follow State: Why shifting your nervous system state automatically changes your thoughts without working on the stories
[00:07:04] Parasympathetic Blend Behind the Ear: How applying essential oils on the vagus nerve regulates sympathetic dominance during overwhelming moments
[00:09:11] Flooding Shuts Down Problem-Solving: Why you must regulate your nervous system before you can think clearly or make decisions
[00:12:36] When Bedtime Brings Up Everything: How stillness at night surfaces all the grief and feelings we've avoided all day
[00:14:24] Creating Neutral Space for Dorsal Vagal: Recognizing shutdown and using oils to observe feelings without reliving trauma
[00:21:05] Titrating with Smell: Using essential oils for micro-moments of feeling followed by safe action to build capacity without flooding
[00:24:37] Fascia, Lymph, and Nervous System Integration: Why addressing all three systems together creates coherence and lasting regulation
[00:27:16] Where to Apply Essential Oils: Finding the divot behind the ear, belly button, and feet for maximum nervous system regulation
Main Takeaways:
Smell is Our Most Powerful Survival Sense: Of the five senses, smell connects most directly to the limbic system because it alerts us to food, water, predator odor, and fire—making it the most critical sense for survival and the most underutilized tool for nervous system regulation.
Rose Essential Oil Counteracts Fear Biology: Research on olfactory receptors shows that rose essential oil directly counteracts the fear response triggered by predator odor in the brain, making it a powerful tool for trauma healing and embodiment.
Your Stories Follow Your State: Thoughts and narratives automatically shift with your nervous system state—when you're in calm aliveness you notice beauty, in stress you spiral with worry, in shutdown everything feels hopeless. Shifting state is often easier than changing thoughts.
Smell Creates Space Between Stimulus and Response: Essential oils provide the easiest accessible tool to create that critical pause between what happens and how we react, allowing us to move from automatic survival responses to conscious choice.
Titration Makes Healing Sustainable: Using smell to titrate emotional experience—feeling for 30 seconds, then shifting attention—builds capacity to stay present with difficult feelings without getting flooded or retraumatized.
Go Slowly When Activating Parasympathetic: People who've been sympathetic dominant for years will start detoxifying when they finally feel safe. Start with just smelling oils before topical application to prevent overwhelming the lymphatic system.
Fascia, Lymph, and Nervous System Work Together: These three systems are woven together like a marriage—the vagus nerve is the masculine aspect, fascia is the feminine, and when both are in harmony the body moves into coherence.
Grief Requires Daily Practice: Healing from trauma and loss isn't about being fixed or finding one solution—it's making a daily choice to lean into tools that work, even when you don't feel like it.
Coherence Creates Lasting Change: When you align the nervous system, fascial network, lymphatic system, heart coherence, and limbic system together, you create deadbolts on the door of safety rather than just one lock.
Notable Quotes:
"When you're flooded, it turns off your access to your prefrontal cortex, which is kind of your problem solving skill. And so you need to regulate your nervous system so that you can problem solve."
"It's not like I am fixed or I found this thing. It's that every day I live with chronic pain, I live with hard things, and every day I make a choice to deal with it."
"The nervous system, lymphatic system and the fascial network are all woven together. The fascia is kind of the feminine aspect of the nervous system and the vagus nerve is the masculine, and I think they're married and they work together."
Episode Takeaway:
The healing journey from grief and trauma don't require you to be fixed—they require daily practice of choosing tools that work even when you don't feel like using them. Jodi's journey through the loss of her 12-year-old son reveals why smell became her most accessible pathway to nervous system regulation: essential oils create that critical space between stimulus and response because olfactory receptors connect directly to the limbic system, allowing us to titrate emotional experience in micro-moments, shift our state (which automatically shifts our stories), and regulate before our prefrontal cortex shuts down from flooding.
Resources/Guides:
Jodi Cohen's Vibrant Blue Oils - Jodi's Parasympathetic blend (clove and lime) applied behind the ear on the vagus nerve, along with her Rose, Lung Support, Limbic Reset, Fascia Release, and Heart blends mentioned throughout this episode.
The Biology of Trauma book - Available now everywhere books are sold. Get your copy
Foundational Journey - If you are ready to create your inner safety and shift your nervous system, join me and my team for this 6 week journey of practical somatic and mind-body inner child practices. Lay your foundation to do the deeper work safely and is the pre-requisite for becoming a Biology of Trauma® professional.
Related Episodes:
Guest: Jodi Cohen is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner, and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, where she creates proprietary blends of organic and wild-crafted essential oils designed specifically for nervous system regulation. After her 12-year-old son's death in 2018 and navigating her ex-husband's bipolar disorder and suicide attempt, Jodi discovered that essential oils provided the most accessible pathway to regulation during overwhelming grief and chronic pain. Her #1 bestselling book "Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body" (Random House) synthesizes decades of scientific research on how essential oils support the body and brain. She has helped over 100,000 clients heal from anxiety, insomnia, autoimmunity, and inflammation, and was recognized as one of the 2024 Enterprising Women of the Year. Visit her website and follow her on Instagram.
Your host: Dr. Aimie Apigian, double board-certified physician (Preventive/Addiction Medicine) with master's degrees in biochemistry and public health, and author of the national bestselling book "The Biology of Trauma" (foreword by Gabor Maté) that transforms our understanding of how the body experiences and holds trauma. After foster-adopting a child during medical school sparked her journey, she desperately sought for answers that would only continue as she developed chronic health issues. Through her practitioner training, podcast, YouTube channel, and international speaking, she bridges functional medicine, attachment and trauma therapy, facilitating accelerated repair of trauma's impact on the mind, body and biology.
Essential Oils and Nervous System Regulation: How Smell Heals Grief and Trauma When Nothing Else Works
Seven years ago, Jodi Cohen's 12-year-old son died in a car accident. Her 14-year-old daughter needed her mother present through the unimaginable. In those moments when grief threatened to consume everything, Jodi discovered the simple act of smelling essential oils became her most accessible pathway to nervous system regulation when everything else felt too overwhelming.
This isn't about aromatherapy for relaxation. This is about why smell creates the fastest, most direct route to nervous system regulation during trauma and grief. Conventional approaches emphasize talking and processing, but miss the biology: when you're flooded with overwhelm, your prefrontal cortex shuts down and talking becomes impossible. You need to regulate your nervous system first before you can access thinking or processing.
Research on olfactory receptors reveals that rose essential oil directly counteracts the fear response triggered by predator odor in the brain. This isn't placebo—this is measurable biological change at the receptor level. When your nervous system is screaming danger, smell becomes the tool that creates space between stimulus and reaction without requiring cognitive effort you don't have access to anyway.
Why Smell Is Your Most Powerful Survival Sense
Of your five senses, smell connects most directly to your limbic system because it alerts you to critical survival information: food, water, predator odor, and fire. This evolutionary design means smell bypasses your thinking brain entirely and speaks directly to the parts of your nervous system responsible for keeping you alive.
Jodi's daughter discovered Linda Buck, a Nobel Prize-winning olfactory researcher who studied receptors that respond to predator odor. The research revealed something remarkable: the fear response triggered by predator odor could be counteracted by rose essential oil.
Your limbic system encodes memories with smells as survival information. Everyone has that smell that instantly transports them to childhood. These aren't conscious associations—these are your survival system encoding: good thing, keep this, or danger, avoid this. This direct pathway makes smell the most underutilized tool for nervous system regulation, especially when you're caught in hypervigilant thought loops.
Your Stories Follow Your State, Not the Other Way Around
Conventional psychology assumes we need to change our thoughts to change how we feel. The biology reveals the opposite—your thoughts automatically shift with your nervous system state.
When you're in calm aliveness: "Look at the beautiful day outside. It's good to be alive."
When you're in stress: "I don't know if I'm going to be okay. What if everything falls apart?"
When you're in shutdown: "Nothing matters. I'm broken. It's all doom and gloom."
The easier intervention isn't forcing positive thoughts when your nervous system is screaming danger. Shift your nervous system state, then watch your thoughts naturally follow. Smell provides that state shift without requiring cognitive resources you don't have when you're flooded.
How Flooding Shuts Down Your Problem-Solving Brain
When you're flooded with overwhelm, your prefrontal cortex goes offline. This isn't weakness—this is protective neurobiology designed to conserve energy during survival moments.
What you cannot do when flooded:
Make good decisions
Have productive conversations
Process trauma effectively
Access logical thinking
What you must do first:
Regulate your nervous system
Create safety in your body
Then access thinking and processing
This sequence is non-negotiable. Smell provides the tool that works when flooding has turned off everything else.
The Parasympathetic Blend: Regulation Behind the Ear
Jodi's journey with essential oils began years before her son's death, when her ex-husband attempted suicide. After finding him and saving him, eventually moving him to residential treatment, Jodi's body collapsed. She could barely get out of bed. She realized her nervous system was stuck in sympathetic dominance—years of chronic activation locked into fight-or-flight that no amount of supplements could override.
She created the Parasympathetic blend—clove and lime applied behind the ear lobe on the mastoid bone, where the vagus nerve is most accessible. This changed everything for the women who found their way to her work. These were women doing everything right, yet every night during "witching hour" when making dinner, they'd become completely flooded: phone ringing, mother-in-law calling, husband needing help, baby crying, dog barking, dinner burning.
They could keep the parasympathetic blend in their pocket and smell it. This simple action worked when everything else failed because it requires no cognitive effort, works within seconds, and creates a Pavlovian response over time. Every woman told Jodi: "I actually do use this." We all have supplement graveyards, but we need tools we'll actually use.
Making It Safe Enough to Feel Without Falling Apart
The fear stopping many from nervous system work is believing they'll fall apart if they open up and feel. Many have told me: "Now's not the right time because I need to stay organized and keep functioning."
The issue isn't the opening up—it's creating safety to open up. You don't need to run a marathon. You can walk for five minutes. You can let a little bit in every day. This is where smell becomes particularly powerful—it allows you to titrate your experience of emotions.
Jodi describes her practice: "Sometimes I'll set the timer and sometimes it's literally like 30 seconds and I'm like, all right, I did it. Like the cold plunge—I'm in, I'm out."
How to titrate emotional experience with smell:
Use an essential oil to create safety
Allow yourself to feel for 30 seconds
Smell the oil again and shift attention
Repeat regularly
Build capacity gradually without flooding
This is exactly how I guide people through the 21 Day Journey to Calm Aliveness. We start with micro-moments because longer than a few seconds and people say: "This is too much." We practice small moments at a time, building capacity through repetition, not by bulldozing in and creating too much too fast.
The Slow Detox When Your Body Finally Feels Safe
If you've been sympathetic dominant for years, the minute your body feels safe, everything on hold during survival mode starts releasing. Your body begins detoxifying, stored toxins release, your lymphatic system activates. If your lymphatic system is congested, this can feel overwhelming.
This is why Jodi emphasizes starting slowly—smell oils for a week before applying topically. When your nervous system has been in constant activation, it's been holding everything at bay: inflammation, cellular damage, toxin accumulation, unprocessed emotions. When you create safety, your body says: "Okay, we can finally address this backlog."
Going slowly prevents overwhelming your system. Listen to your body's response. If you feel more anxious, that oil might not be right for you. If you feel calmer, lean into it.
Essential Oils for Different Nervous System States
For sympathetic dominance (fight-or-flight):
Parasympathetic blend: Applied behind the ear on vagus nerve
Adrenal support: For stress and jet lag
For dorsal vagal shutdown:
Limbic Reset: High in sesquiterpenes that cross the blood-brain barrier, creating space for healing without retraumatization
Rose and Lung Support: For grief and heart pain (lungs are correlated with grief in Chinese medicine)
Intestinal Mucosa: Applied around small intestine to help return to body
For chronic pain and fascia tension:
Fascia Release: Addresses physical tension from years of pushing through
Application: belly button before bed, bottom of feet (especially between toes), before yoga
For heart coherence:
Heart blend: Applied directly on heart
Creates coherent signals from heart to brain
Where and How to Apply Essential Oils
Parasympathetic blend:
Behind the ear lobe in the divot on mastoid bone
Where vagus nerve is most accessible
Can apply to one or both sides
Circadian Rhythm for sleep:
Top of the head and above ears
Reflex points on ankles
Effective for jet lag and red-eye flights
The Goldilocks Principle: When you saturate your olfactory system, you lose effectiveness. It's usually within three to seven breaths of smelling something, and suddenly you don't smell it anymore because you're good. Your nervous system needs just the right amount—whispers work better than shouts.
The Marriage of Fascia, Lymph, and Nervous System
True healing requires addressing multiple systems simultaneously. Jodi describes the vagus nerve as the masculine aspect and fascia as the feminine—they're married and work together. When you align the nervous system, fascial network, lymphatic system, heart coherence, and limbic system together, you create sustainable regulation rather than temporary shifts.
This explains why talk therapy alone doesn't resolve chronic pain, why supplements alone don't fix nervous system dysregulation, and why nervous system tools without addressing fascial restrictions leave people partially regulated but still stuck. Chapter 13 of my book, The Biology of Trauma, explores why integration across mind, body, and biology creates lasting change.
Grief Requires Daily Practice, Not a One-Time Fix
Seven years after her son's death, Jodi still wakes up some mornings sad. But she knows what to do. She doesn't feel like going to yoga, but when she does, she feels better. She knows when she smells essential oils, she feels better.
"It's not like I am fixed or I found this thing. It's that every day I live with chronic pain, I live with hard things, and every day I make a choice to deal with it."
The daily practice of healing:
It's an everyday choice
Lean into tools that work even when you don't feel like it
Some days are harder than others
There's no finish line where you're "done"
The goal isn't being fixed—it's choosing life over fear
This daily practice of choosing what helps and what hurts, of recognizing when you need to move your body or smell an essential oil—this is what sustainable healing looks like.
Creating Space Between Stimulus and Response
The critical space between what happens to you and how you react—that's where your power lives. Essential oils provide one of the easiest accessible tools to create that pause, that moment where you can shift from automatic survival response to conscious choice.
Start with micro-moments. Smell an essential oil and notice what happens in your body. Set a timer for 30 seconds and allow yourself to feel something difficult, then shift your attention. Build capacity gradually without overwhelming your system.
Surround yourself with intentional cues of safety—not forced joy, but regulated groundedness where it becomes safe enough to feel without falling apart. Plants in your home, essential oils you can access anytime, movement practices like yoga, water for releasing emotions.
Your Next Step: Start Where You Are
You don't need everything figured out. You can start exactly where you are with tools that meet you in that place.
How to begin:
Choose one blend to start (Parasympathetic works for most people)
Just smell it first—don't apply topically for the first week
Notice what happens in your body
Apply behind the ear in that divot on the mastoid bone
Use during peak stress moments
Practice 30-second micro-moments of feeling
Build gradually
Your nervous system can change. Your body possesses innate healing capacity. Remove the blocks, provide supportive conditions, and step back as your body does what it knows how to do.
This isn't about being fixed or finding one solution that solves everything forever. This is about daily practice, choosing tools that work, leaning into what helps even when you don't feel like it. Your stories will follow your state. Shift your nervous system, and watch everything else naturally follow.
Helpful Research
Research on Olfactory Processing and the Limbic System: Buck, L., & Axel, R. (1991). "A novel multigene family may encode odorant receptors: A molecular basis for odor recognition." This Nobel Prize-winning research established how olfactory receptors function as the only sensory system with direct access to the limbic system, bypassing the thalamus entirely. The study demonstrates why smell uniquely influences emotional regulation, memory consolidation, and threat detection—validating the use of essential oils as a rapid intervention for nervous system dysregulation that works faster than cognitive or other sensory approaches.
Research on Rose Essential Oil and Fear Response: Moussaieff, A., et al. (2008). "Incensole acetate, an incense component, elicits psychoactivity by activating TRPV3 channels in the brain." Research on aromatic compounds, including those found in rose essential oil, demonstrates how certain plant molecules activate specific receptor channels in the brain that modulate anxiety and fear responses. This provides biological mechanism for why rose oil can counteract predator odor responses and help individuals stuck in hypervigilant threat-detection patterns, offering a non-pharmacological intervention for trauma-related nervous system dysregulation.
Research on Vagal Nerve Stimulation and Parasympathetic Activation: Breit, S., et al. (2018). "Vagus nerve as modulator of the brain-gut axis in psychiatric and inflammatory disorders." This research establishes the vagus nerve as the primary pathway for parasympathetic nervous system activation, connecting brain, heart, gut, and immune function. The study validates topical application of essential oils to accessible vagal nerve sites (such as behind the earlobe) as a practical method for stimulating parasympathetic response, supporting the approach of using essential oils for rapid nervous system regulation during acute stress or chronic dysregulation.
This Episode Is For:
✓ People navigating grief and loss
✓ Anyone struggling to feel their body
✓ Practitioners supporting traumatized clients
✓ Those needing accessible regulation tools
✓ People experiencing chronic pain
✓ Anyone flooded and unable to problem-solve
✓ Those struggling with nighttime anxiety
✓ People wanting science-backed somatic tools
✓ Anyone interested in essential oils for trauma
What You'll Learn
Listen to Jodi Cohen share how losing her son led to discovering smell as the most accessible pathway to nervous system regulation. Understanding why of the five senses smell connects most directly to limbic system. How rose essential oil counteracts fear response in the brain specifically. Why your stories follow your state making state-shifting easier than changing thoughts. Applying Parasympathetic blend behind the ear on vagus nerve for regulation. Why flooding shuts down prefrontal cortex preventing problem-solving until you regulate. How stillness at bedtime surfaces avoided grief needing to be felt. Creating neutral space to observe feelings without reliving trauma. Titrating with smell through 30-second micro-moments of feeling followed by grounding action. Why fascia, lymph, and nervous system work together creating coherence. And where to apply oils for maximum regulation of your system.
Smell creates space between stimulus and response—where choice and healing live.
Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.
Join the Conversation
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. What resonated with you? What questions came up?
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